Unbox Me, Blind Town
I left —
no one noticed.
I slipped away,
unseen, unheard,
not a whisper behind me,
not a question asked.
Years later,
a town I used to call home,
but home is just a word,
a hollow echo,
walls lined with memories
I can’t recognize.
You watched.
Teachers, neighbours, friends, family —
you watched.
Like spectators at a play,
you knew how the story went,
saw the scars carved into my eyes
heard the cracks in my voice,
felt the air tighten when I entered a room,
and still,
you did nothing.
You smiled,
nods of complicity,
words like glass shards:
“How are you doing?”
as if my pain
were a polite conversation piece.
You wanted me to dance,
to leap on your command,
to meet your twisted expectations —
higher, higher,
so my fall would satisfy your thirst
for shattered things.
I am fog,
drifting between your sentences,
a scream swallowed whole,
a breath trapped between syllables,
lost between histories
that refused to hold me.
You never knew me.
You never wanted to know me.
The truth was a bitter pill
too jagged to swallow.
So you turned away,
chose blindness,
chose comfort over courage,
chose to watch from behind your curtains,
hands folded,
mouths silent,
hearts hollow.
And now you stand there, smiling.
The ones who watched me shrink,
watched me fold into myself,
and my voice vanish.
You did nothing,
but now you say:
“We’re so proud of you.”
Pride tastes like ash on your lips.
“We didn’t think you’d make it.”
I made it despite you, not because of you.
“Look how far you’ve come.”
Don’t you dare measure my distance
with your empty hands.
You hand me a box —
no, you hand me the box.
You try to mold me from absence,
define me by survival,
but survival is not a box;
it’s a raw edge,
a bleeding truth,
a story you didn’t care to read.
I was a caged thing,
a circus animal trained to endure,
to perform,
to survive.
But I slipped the bars,
escaped the rust of your indifference.
And now you stare, wide-eyed,
fearful of the wild thing I’ve become,
fearful of the truth I carry,
fearful that I know who you are:
Cowards in the guise of good people.
Jump.
How high can I go?
Jump.
How high until the air thins,
Jump.
until I shatter into the fall —
not falling, but the fall itself,
a descent into everything and nothing,
where identity splinters
on impact.
When I find my voice —
oh, and I will find it —
I will roar,
I will burn the fog away,
and I will make sure you are seen,
every one of you.
Your complicity laid bare,
your cowardice exposed,
your false smiles turned to dust.
You know who you are.
I walk in fog,
each step untethered,
no prints left behind.
The horizon whispers of places
that do not exist for me.
But I walk.
No box, no shape, no middle,
no end.
Just the journey of being
too vast to be held,
too real to be labelled,
too lost to be anything
but free.
You watched me suffer.
Now, watch me rise.